Meta announces Quest Pro, a $1,499 'mixed reality' device coming October 25

The MetaQuest Pro. Meta

A premium price for a premium device.

A charging cradle will allow users to easily charge the Quest Pro and its controllers.

A demonstration of the types of non-verbal communication and avatar expressions possible with the Quest Pro's inward-facing cameras.

A demonstration of how a game like Beat Saber can be layered over a "real world" environment for a mixed reality experience with Quest Pro.

Mark Zuckerberg presents a new avatar design, with moving facial expressions, which Meta hopes to roll out in 2023, Just under a year after changing its name to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook has announced the Quest Pro, a $1,499 “mixed reality” headset that will ship on October 25.

Part of this "mixed reality" pivot comes from the Quest Pro's more open lens design, which allows users to see the physical world around them in their peripheral vision. This should allow users to perform simple real-world tasks without removing the headset, such as "jotting down a note, typing something on your desk, or just being aware of what's going on around you," Meta said. However, users who want a more immersive experience can clip magnetic "light blockers" to the side of the headset for a "partially blocked" grip on the outside world (optional accessories will enable "fully immersed" experiences if a user wishes to completely shut off their surroundings, Meta said.

Quest Pro also features new color passthrough cameras that capture four times the resolution of those in the Quest 2, Meta said. Combined with a depth system that can sense the location of objects in your surroundings, allowing mixed reality overlay of virtual objects onto a stereoscopic display of your real surroundings, with new "anchoring" technology that locks these virtual objects in place, said Meta.

More power, more features

Technically, the Quest Pro boasts a Snapdragon XR2+ processor and 12GB of memory (compared to 6GB on the Quest 2). This means the device "runs at 50% more power" than Quest 2, Meta said, with better heat dissipation as well.

A new pancake lens design, meanwhile, bends light from the screens back on itself multiple times in the path of the eye, allowing for a lens enclosure that's 40% thinner than Quest's 2. These displays have 37% more pixels per inch than the Quest 2, Meta said, resulting in a resolution of 1800×1920 pixels per eye at 90Hz refresh rates. These displays also generate 75% more more contrast thanks to "local dimming technology," Meta said, and feature "1.3x greater color gamut" than Quest 2.

At the other end of the device, Meta's "first curved cellular battery" slips behind the user's skull to provide better overall balance, Meta said. But a representative of Meta told the Ve...